tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/henry-james-18937/articles
Henry James – The Conversation
2020-10-23T15:24:18Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/148646
2020-10-23T15:24:18Z
2020-10-23T15:24:18Z
Netflix horror: the real demons haunting Bly Manor
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365197/original/file-20201023-21-1eqjrvf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=371%2C134%2C3071%2C2101&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Haunting scene: Jim Piddick as Father Stack in Netflix's The Haunting of Bly Manor.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EIKE SCHROTER/NETFLIX © 2020</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em><strong>Spoiler alert: this article explores some general plot trends from the series.</strong></em></p>
<p>The clear standout among this Halloween season’s TV offerings is <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/81237854">The Haunting of Bly Manor</a>, a ghost story adapted from the Henry James <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turn_of_the_Screw">novella</a> The Turn of the Screw. In a strange twist for a TV series, the second episode features a <a href="https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/haunting-bly-manor-biblical-connection-explained-47865788">conversation</a> between Miles (a haunted orphan and one of the lead characters) and a priest about a biblical exorcism. </p>
<p>Young Miles worries about whether or not the Gerasene demoniac – a man on whom Jesus performed an exorcism, mentioned in the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke – allowed the legion of demons to possess him. The conversation gives us some insight into Miles’s world and foreshadows the plot twists to come.</p>
<p>But the story of the Gerasene demoniac speaks to a reality that is more terrifying than The Haunting of Bly Manor. He is, as I and others have <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780230338296">argued</a> before, one of a number of Biblical characters ostracised from society for what we might now call disabilities. Others include women with gynaecological problems and people suffering from leprosy. </p>
<p>According to the Bible, the possessed man had been repeatedly shackled and placed in isolation, away from his family, friends and the rest of his community. He lived in a cemetery, was chained up, naked and homeless.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Then they came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gadarenes.<br>
And when He had come out of the boat, immediately there met Him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit,<br>
who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no one could bind him, not even with chains,<br>
because he had often been bound with shackles and chains. And the chains had been pulled apart by him, and the shackles broken in pieces; neither could anyone tame him.<br>
And always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying out and cutting himself with stones.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is easy to assume that he was “bound with shackles and chains” because he was possessed – but the gospels do not supply us with a complete medical history. His ability to break free of restraints might as easily serve as a sign of his desperation as his supernatural power. We do not know whether or not the experience of being exiled to a cemetery had exacerbated whatever physical or psychological traits had led to his forcible exclusion from his community in the first place.</p>
<p>An important recent <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15699/jbl.1383.2019.650443?seq=1">article</a> by Boston University Bible scholar <a href="https://www.bu.edu/sth/profile/luis-menendez-antuna/">Luis Menéndez-Antuña</a> explores how solitary confinement affects the wellbeing of those who are imprisoned and uses these experiences to reread the Bible story. Those placed in conditions similar to those of the demoniac, he writes, often experience extreme psychological side effects that “distort, undo, unhinge, and unglue subjectivity”.</p>
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<p>Victims of this kind of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_death">social death</a> feel detachment from their own bodies and identities, and even an inability to recall their own names. Convicted murderer Jack Abbott, who died in prison in 2002 but <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/128/in-the-belly-of-the-beast-by-jack-henry-abbott/">wrote letters</a> describing the prison system and his experience of being confined to a blackout cell (a small room with no light), recalled: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I heard someone screaming far way and it was me. I fell against the wall, and as if it were a catapult, was hurled across the cell to the opposite wall. Back and forth I reeled, from the door to the walls, screaming. Insane.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.aclu.org/other/stop-solitary-stories-solitary">Other</a> former prisoners <a href="https://solitarywatch.org/2013/03/11/voices-from-solitary-a-sentence-worse-than-death/">describe</a> the experience of radical separation from human contact as “choking” them and trying to “squeeze sanity” from their mind. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.afsc.org/resource/solitary-confinement-facts">Documented</a> <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/what-does-solitary-confinement-do-to-your-mind/">effects</a> of solitary confinement include auditory and visual <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stuart_Grassian/publication/19222106_Effects_of_sensory_deprivation_in_psychiatric_seclusion_and_solitary_confinement/links/59e4d240a6fdcc1b1d8d1b09/Effects-of-sensory-deprivation-in-psychiatric-seclusion-and-solitary-confinement.pdf">hallucinations</a>, paranoia, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11524-017-0138-1">PTSD</a>, uncontrollable rage, <a href="https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/ajph.2013.301742">self-harm</a> and mutilation, diminished impulse control, and distortions of time and perception. </p>
<h2>We are legion</h2>
<p>This is precisely what we see with the Gerasene demoniac. He no longer identifies as himself and instead identifies himself as a legion of beings. The exorcism story, in which the demons are expelled from the man into a herd of pigs, is as much about reintegrating the man into society as it is about expelling evil forces. But what <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Solitary_Confinement/Qu5zDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">sociology</a> and personal experiences tell us about the violent effects of the conditions in which he had been forced to live raises questions about how we should tell his story.</p>
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<img alt="Medeival mosaic of Jesus expelling the Gerasene demoniac's demons into pigs." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365171/original/file-20201023-18-cdqlmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/365171/original/file-20201023-18-cdqlmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365171/original/file-20201023-18-cdqlmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365171/original/file-20201023-18-cdqlmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365171/original/file-20201023-18-cdqlmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365171/original/file-20201023-18-cdqlmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/365171/original/file-20201023-18-cdqlmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Was the Gerasene demoniac possessed or an early example of the mistreatment of people suffering mental health conditions?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mosaic from the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Whether or not we believe in the supernatural, we can ask whether the man’s condition was caused or exacerbated by members of his own family or community. Historically speaking, many people, including Jesus himself in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+3%3A20-25&version=NRSV">Mark 3:20-25</a>, have been accused of possession for their failure or inability to conform to certain social norms. We should not assume that all of the behavioural characteristics or torments the demoniac is experiencing when we meet him were present before his initial confinement. </p>
<p>As the coronavirus <a href="https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/health-emergencies/coronavirus-covid-19/publications-and-technical-guidance/noncommunicable-diseases/mental-health-and-covid-19">pandemic</a> has shown us: isolation and loneliness are stressors for everyone, but <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2008017">especially</a> for those with mental illness. The Gerasene demoniac experienced something much worse.</p>
<p>The realisation that we do not know what role violent exclusion played in the possessed man’s condition raises questions about the ethics of some of our own practices when it comes to imprisonment. We should ask how certain punitive measures psychologically damage those who are incarcerated. Though it may seem as though we have come a long way from Bly Manor, we actually have not. </p>
<p>Over the course of the season, we learn that the primary evil character in the show became vengeful after being abandoned and confined alone for many decades. Even in the realm of fantasy, solitary confinement is psychological torture. It is of isolation and loneliness that we should truly be afraid.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148646/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Candida Moss does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A much talked-about scene from the latest Netflix horror raises important questions about how the Bible deals with mental health.
Candida Moss, Cadbury Professor of Theology, University of Birmingham
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/147878
2020-10-12T13:30:05Z
2020-10-12T13:30:05Z
The Haunting of Bly Manor: why Henry James’s eerie tale still inspires so many adaptations
<p>New on Netflix, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/the-haunting-of-bly-manor-netflix-reviews-reactions-stream-horror-b936282.html">The Haunting of Bly Manor</a> is the latest in a long line of adaptations of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) that began in 1954 with <a href="https://brittenpears.org/explore/benjamin-britten/music/operas/the-turn-of-the-screw/">Benjamin Britten’s opera</a>. Since then, there have been more than 25 others. Adaptors’ enduring fascination with James’s “<a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-13713-8_3">irresponsible little fiction</a>” can be summed up in a word: ambiguity.</p>
<p>It is the story of a young governess who comes to suspect that her deceased predecessor, Miss Jessel, and the late valet Peter Quint, are exerting a continued influence over her orphaned charges, Miles and Flora. This influence is not only spectral but quite possibly sexual in nature. </p>
<p>As James’s opening line predicted, “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/209/209-h/209-h.htm">the story … held us</a>”, and its readers quickly fell into two main camps. Metaphysical readers chose to “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930436?seq=1">believe the governess</a>” and believe in the ghosts, while psychological readers – most famously American writer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edmund-Wilson">Edmund Wilson</a> in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Dt43AAAAIAAJ&dq=the+triple+thinkers&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=">his 1934 essay</a> – maintained that “the ghosts are not real ghosts … but merely the hallucinations of the governess”. She, in turn, was a “neurotic case of sex repression”, possibly acting out of a sublimated desire for her employer, the children’s uncle. </p>
<p>Yet neither metaphysical nor psychological readings proved able to contain this story, whose details stubbornly refuse to be explained away. If the valet Quint is a hallucination, how is the housekeeper able to identify him from the governess’s description? But equally, if he has an independent existence, why, as the literature academic <a href="https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/ca/product/Turn-of-the-Screw/p/0312597061?selected_tab=About">Sheila Teahan has noted</a>, does the governess associate him with the act of writing? The governess suggests that Quint is only as real as “the letters I form on this page”, implying that he is her creative construct. </p>
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<p>James’s novella thus demands a third approach, of which literary critic Shoshana Felman’s <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930436?seq=1">Turning the Screw of Interpretation (1977)</a> is among the finest examples. Rather than attempting to scare the tale into consistency, this reading recognises that its ambiguity is fundamental to its effect.</p>
<p>With this in mind, The Turn of the Screw’s appeal to adaptors might seem paradoxical. How can the ghosts’ objective reality remain uncertain when we see them walk, talk, and, in Britten’s case, sing a 12-tone opera? Yet adaptors have used a range of innovative strategies to maintain the text’s ambiguity. The term is usefully defined in a cinematic context by director <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=L0AnPwAACAAJ&dq=mackendrick+on+filmmaking&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjDm9Hxga3sAhXBsHEKHYttB6QQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg">Alexander Mackendrick</a>, not as “a lack of clarity” but as a contrast between “alternative meanings, each of them clear”.</p>
<h2>On-screen ambiguity</h2>
<p>Director Jack Clayton <a href="https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/%E6%97%A0%E8%BE%9C%E7%9A%84%E4%BA%BA?id=F267B547F11FA821MV&hl=fi">recruited Stanley Kubrick</a> to rework the original script for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOsF0S65RR0&t=7s">The Innocents</a> (1961) with one clear remit: to maximise the tale’s ambiguity. In the resultant film, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEkAKpFMJW4">scene at the lake</a> offers at least two alternative meanings for the appearance of Miss Jessel. </p>
<p>We see the governess (Deborah Kerr) react to a figure standing among the rushes, but a few frames later, Jessel has vanished. Has she appeared and then disappeared, or has the governess simply imagined her? Flora’s troubled face is inconclusive, reacting as much to her governess’s agitation as to any apparition. </p>
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<p>In <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0230600/">The Others</a>
(2001), an oblique adaptation, creator Alejandro Amenábar takes an innovative stance on the ghosts’ reality. Marooned in an isolated house in post-second-world-war Jersey, Grace (Nicole Kidman), a staunch Catholic, resists her children’s claims to hear ghosts. It transpires that they are actually hearing the house’s new owners and that it is the children and their mother who are the ghosts. Overwhelmed by grief at her husband’s death, Grace, we eventually learn, smothered the children before shooting herself. </p>
<p>The Others thus combines metaphysical and psychological readings of its source. The ghosts are, in a sense, “real” (though not what we are led to believe), while at the same time, the “governess” figure, Grace, is also established as untrustworthy.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0B_4rWxF48">Tim Fywell’s 2009 BBC adaptation</a>, the governess (Michelle Dockery) is a patient in a post-first-world-war mental institution, a frame narrative that invites viewers to question the legitimacy of her testimony. Yet when, having implicated herself in Miles’s death, she is taken away in a prison van to be executed, her psychologist briefly hallucinates that the guard is Peter Quint. Such details left me wondering, as the psychologist seemed to be, whether the governess was indeed guilty, or was being prematurely and irrevocably silenced.</p>
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<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxeiY2W03Mc">The teaser for The Haunting of Bly Manor</a> reprises the eerie <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0uNJp15p3M&list=RDABxdwKqIz4Q&index=2">O Willow Waly</a> song from The Innocents, paying homage to this foundational adaptation. The line “we lay, my love and I, beneath the weeping willow”, sung in Flora’s (Amelia Bea Smith’s) treble, chillingly captures the novella’s preoccupation with childhood innocence exposed to adult sexuality. In many of the adaptations, these shivers are compounded by our inability to entirely trust what we see, generating unanswered questions that keep the adaptive wheel turning.</p>
<p>We are likely to see many more screen translations, and more of the literary appropriations I discuss in <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030316495">my book</a>, of which AN Wilson’s <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/103/1030303/a-jealous-ghost/9780099478669.html">A Jealous Ghost</a> (2005) and John Harding’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhTK_9_5kS0">Florence and Giles</a> (2010) are examples. Viewers and readers will continue to find what <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393959048/about-the-book/table-of-contents">Virginia Woolf found in 1921</a>: this is a story that “can still make us afraid of the dark”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/147878/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bethany Layne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Be they ghosts or her mind playing tricks? The uncertainty is the draw of the 1898 classic The Turn of the Screw.
Bethany Layne, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, De Montfort University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/63025
2016-08-02T08:50:12Z
2016-08-02T08:50:12Z
The Living and the Dead captures Victorian anxieties about science and the supernatural
<p>From telegraphs to television sets, new technologies have often been imagined as strange or magical in the popular consciousness. It is no coincidence that developments in 19th century science and technology like the railway, the phonograph, and the photograph coincided with a deep cultural fascination with the paranormal. Discussions of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-victorians-brought-famous-artists-back-from-the-dead-in-seances-62647">seances</a>, spirit mediums and purported photos of ghosts were found in the newspapers of the day, and science was used to either try to prove or repudiate the claims. These feverish times are the setting for BBC One’s supernatural drama <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03wv2rl">The Living and the Dead</a>. </p>
<p>In the opening episode, pioneering photographer Charlotte Appleby (played by Charlotte Spencer) reflects in wonder that “You could be dead and buried a hundred years, and people could still hear what you sounded like” while listening to phonograph recordings of people from the Somerset village of Shepzoy. It is 1894, and she and her psychologist husband Nathan (played by Colin Morgan) have moved to the village to take charge of the family estate.</p>
<p>Her enthusiasm for this new medium is quickly dampened, however, when the voice of Nathan’s young son who tragically drowned fills the room, urging his father to join him in play. Various other paranormal events soon follow. Ghostly voices emerging from the phonograph are replicated by a young woman who claims to have been possessed by the spirit of a local man who died without having been baptised. A railway survey unleashes the unquiet souls of five boys who died in a mine collapse. The ghosts of roundhead cavalrymen descend. And there is the curious apparition of a woman with what viewers recognise as an iPad – presumably too absorbed in her screen to notice that she has wandered into the 19th century.</p>
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<h2>Gothic horrors</h2>
<p>Series creator Ashley Pharoah described the series as “<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/06/28/the-living-and-the-dead-is-thomas-hardy-with-ghosts--and-time-tr/">Hardy with ghosts</a>”. In many ways, the village of Shepzoy is a new take on Thomas Hardy’s fictional county of Wessex which, modelled on the counties of England’s southwest, self-consciously captured the tensions between the city and country at the moment the transformations brought by the railways and the industrial revolution began to unfold.</p>
<p>Charlotte distinctly resembles <a href="http://www.bustle.com/articles/171552-bathsheba-everdene-is-literatures-forgotten-feminist-hero">Bathsheba Everdene</a>, the spirited young woman who inherits and manages her uncle’s farm in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The introduction of new machinery and farming techniques to Shepzoy is met with similar distrust and even satanic associations as they are in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). But ultimately the series has more in common with the Gothic tales of the same period, such as The Turn of the Screw (1898) by American writer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-James-American-writer">Henry James</a> – in fact, the younger brother of William James, a leading early psychologist – or the short stories of In a Glass Darkly (1872) by <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11048229/Sheridan-Le-Fanu-the-father-of-modern-horror-at-200.html">Sheridan Le Fanu</a>, in which self-consciously modern individuals find themselves powerless against dark supernatural forces.</p>
<p>The tense phonograph scene from The Living and the Dead gives an indication of its writer’s engagement with these Gothic themes. And the same motif of strange objects – technological, mystical, or ambiguously situated between the two – that allow the voices of the dead to come to life is one that recurs frequently in the fictions of the time. </p>
<p>For example, in <a href="http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/JapBox.shtml">The Japanned Box</a> (1899) by <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/arthur-conan-doyle-9278600">Sir Arthur Conan Doyle</a> a mysterious woman’s voice, thought to be a ghostly emanation, is revealed to have been produced by a phonograph. In <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/rudyard-kipling-9365581">Rudyard Kipling’s</a> Wireless (1902), mechanical signals inadvertently channel the creative spirit and poetry of the long-dead Keats. In <a href="http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mclandburgh_florence">Florence McLandburgh’s</a> The Automaton Ear (1873), an unnamed professor invents a device able to detect sounds beyond the limits of the human ear – only to be haunted by the now-audible cries of the dead.</p>
<p>In each instance, the scientific instrument in question establishes a threshold between life and death, offering the simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying possibility of passing between the two. The human body and mind become peculiarly vulnerable beyond that threshold, while the stories point also to the limits of scientific knowledge at the time and its capacity to explain the world. </p>
<h2>Technology or totem?</h2>
<p>Communications technologies such as the penny post, the railway, the telegraph, telephone and wireless radio receiver shrunk the distances between people in ways that seemed impossible. For those first witnessing them, they created a powerful sense of removal from the material world, permitting experiences that seemed beyond the realms of normal consciousness and corporeality.</p>
<p>At the same time, new technology provided the means to preserve the past: the phonograph could capture and replay the voices of the dead, the photograph could record their lifelike image, while the then burgeoning science of psychology provided doctors with new ways to consider past versions of the self, and access to the unconscious mind. These anxieties and tensions are invoked in The Living and the Dead in a way that those of the period would have recognised, with the past, present and future drawn together through technology and the supernatural. As the web of connections between individuals in Shepzoy deepens, it becomes increasingly unclear who is being haunted, and who is the ghost.</p>
<p>The plot device of time periods that bleed into one another is one Pharaoh has used in previous series <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478942/">Life on Mars</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1008108">Ashes to Ashes</a>, but perhaps here he has found more suitable material upon which to graft it – after all, the fracturing of the laws of space and time are more comfortably explored in a Victorian ghost story than in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/feb/14/the-sweeney-box-set">The Sweeney</a>. Having binge-watched series one, I’m living in the hope of an apparition from the future that can confirm there will be a second.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63025/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>As part of the Diseases of Modern Life team at St Anne's College, Oxford, Melissa Dickson receives funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme ERC Grant Agreement number 340121.</span></em></p>
BBC One’s The Living and the Dead revels in the Victorians’ obsession with the supernatural and the limits of science.
Melissa Dickson, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/56610
2016-03-31T19:34:28Z
2016-03-31T19:34:28Z
Friday essay: the literary canon is exhilarating and disturbing and we need to read it
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116902/original/image-20160331-28462-1bcou7y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Let's critique the literary canon, but we shouldn't throw the Brontës out with the bathwater. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Brontë Sisters, by Patrick Branwell Brontë, circa 1834.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=k65_dDhfSjwC&dq=War+on+Cliche+Amis&source=gbs_navlinks_s">The Age of Criticism</a>, Martin Amis once wrote, started in 1948 and ended with OPEC. </p>
<p>That is, it started with the publication of F.R. Leavis’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1114002.The_Great_Tradition">The Great Tradition</a> – the book that, more than any other, is synonymous with a narrow and elitist English canon – and ended in economic crisis.</p>
<p>For Amis, this was a giddy utopian time in which everybody who was anybody agreed that literature mattered. For the Leavisites, literature was a depository of shared human values – of “felt life”. For the intellectuals of the New Left, it was a potent source of social-cultural arguments. </p>
<p>Either way, Literature – not writing, or English, or textual studies, but big “L” literature – was the central cultural formation around which everything turned.</p>
<p>Until, that is, the Age of Criticism ended abruptly in the global stagflation of the early 1970s. And all the hippyish young men – and let’s make it clear, they were invariably men – discovered that literature was “one of the many leisure-class fripperies”, as Amis puts it, that the world could do without.</p>
<p>By the end of the 70s, literary criticism crawled back into the academy to contemplate its own death – or worse, its own irrelevance. In the public imagination, literature gave way to film, television and music, and, subsequently, the rise of the Internet, as central repositories of cultural meaning.</p>
<p>By the end of the millennium, English – no longer English Literature – became a weird sort of sub-cultural pursuit, which academic Simon During once evocatively likened to “trainspotting” (in the sense of lonely dysfunctional men clad in anoraks standing in the rain at train stations). Literature, said During, was less and less a canonical cultural formation and more and more a pile of mouldering old books.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116836/original/image-20160330-15137-3hfla5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116836/original/image-20160330-15137-3hfla5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116836/original/image-20160330-15137-3hfla5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116836/original/image-20160330-15137-3hfla5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116836/original/image-20160330-15137-3hfla5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116836/original/image-20160330-15137-3hfla5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116836/original/image-20160330-15137-3hfla5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116836/original/image-20160330-15137-3hfla5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Has literature become a weird hobby?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">carnagenyc</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But even for the self-confessed “trainspotters” safe inside the universities, literature through the 1980s and 1990s seemed to be losing relevance. The words on the page were suddenly insufficient. The study of writing gave way to the study of Ideology and the study of Theory.</p>
<p>There is absolutely no doubt that literature has a long history of being employed as an ideological extension of the State. It was co-opted into the “Civilising Mission” of colonial bureaucrats and became part of the jingoistic imperatives of the “Nation-Building Project” of pre and post war Australia.</p>
<p>As intellectual ventures, then, deconstruction and reconstruction were long overdue. The canon is, after all, a fiercely contested body of work that scholars – for one fiercely contested reason or another – have decided was influential in shaping the history of western culture. If one way to define the canon is “what gets taught”, then it became clear that “what gets taught” had to change.</p>
<p>In the 1980s, the Feminist Canon was consolidated, posing a formidable challenge to the Masculinist Canon. And then, in the bitterly contested Culture Wars of the 1990s, the Great Tradition itself was finally unmasked – not only were all the Great Men Dead but all the Feminists Were White.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116841/original/image-20160330-15137-1qfh56j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116841/original/image-20160330-15137-1qfh56j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116841/original/image-20160330-15137-1qfh56j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116841/original/image-20160330-15137-1qfh56j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116841/original/image-20160330-15137-1qfh56j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=886&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116841/original/image-20160330-15137-1qfh56j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1113&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116841/original/image-20160330-15137-1qfh56j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1113&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116841/original/image-20160330-15137-1qfh56j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1113&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Decorations in the city of Cartagena.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fredy Builes</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But as the Death of the Human followed the Death of the Author, literature – whether Australian, Comparative or Post-Colonial – began to look less like a living corpus and more like a corpse.</p>
<p>One aspect of the problem – perhaps – was that in their haste to unmask the hidden cultural allegiances of the canon, academics appeared to lose interest in the practice of writing.</p>
<p>The dilemma is aptly satirized in David Lodge’s novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/69933.Changing_Places">Changing Places</a> (1979), in which it propels the maniacal ambitions of Professor Morris Zapp (often read as a thinly disguised caricature of the literary critic <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanley-Fish">Stanley Fish</a>). </p>
<p>Zapp’s project – first cast in the 1970s, but developed through Lodge’s trilogy of campus novels through to the 1980s – was to start with Jane Austen then work his way through the canon in a manner calculated to be “utterly exhaustive”. </p>
<p>The object of the exercise, Zapp said, was “not to enhance others enjoyment and understanding” of writing, still less to “honour the novelist herself”. Rather, it was to put a “definitive stop” to anybody’s capacity to say or enjoy anything. The object was not to make the words live, but to extinguish them. </p>
<p>And yet, if literature has been, as Lodge mischievously argued, thoroughly “Zapped” – that is, consigned to the dust heap – then why is it that three decades later there are still few things better calculated to end in tears and acrimony than an essay on the English canon? </p>
<h2>“Dead white women” replaced by living men</h2>
<p>Of course, literature is not just a pile of musty old books. It is also a dense network of cultural allegiances and class beliefs. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the processes of list-making that have been fuelled by curriculum building and accountability projects.</p>
<p>In an era of TEQSA and the AQF, with its CLOs and TLOs, its ERAs and QILTs (forget about the meaning of these acronyms – for Marxists, read “alienation”; for Romantics, read “soulnessness”) academics everywhere are being asked to make lists (and more lists), of what their students ought to read and ought to master. </p>
<p>They are then asked to benchmark those lists and set them (like murdered corpses) in concrete.</p>
<p>Designed to enhance accountability, these list-making exercises have not always been accountable. They take what are often fiercely contested ideas – like the literary canon – and turn them into numbers. I am not alone in having seen unit outlines conspicuously <a href="https://theconversation.com/its-time-to-take-the-curriculum-back-from-dead-white-men-40268">devoid of women and indigenous writers</a>.</p>
<p>At school level, the problem gets worse. Recently, the wife of the Victorian Premier Catherine Andrews <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/premiers-wife-calls-for-gender-equality-in-vce-texts-20160322-gnojk0">called for increased gender equality</a> in the selection of texts for inclusion in the VCE. In 2014, 68.5 percent of the books on the list were written by men. (Last year, it dropped to 61 percent.)</p>
<p>A swift <a href="https://theconversation.com/sorry-kids-men-are-better-writers-than-women-34348">study of high school literature</a> curriculums undertaken in the same year revealed that many other Australian states and territories had published high school English curriculums featuring up to 70 percent of texts by male authors.</p>
<p>This is not the intellectual legacy of the historical fact of patriarchy. Rather, in reading through the density of curriculum documents, an uneasy sense emerges that as the old Feminist Canon – comprising Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes, for example – comes off the curriculum, the so-called “dead white women” are not being replaced by contemporary female – let alone Indigenous or poly-ethnic – authors but by contemporary male ones.</p>
<p>In NSW, the gender count of HSC English texts has <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/gender-imbalance-in-hsc-english-texts-criticised-20141123-11r5c4.html">actually gone backwards</a>. While male writers made up 67 percent men in an earlier curriculum they comprised almost 70 percent in the one most recently published.</p>
<p>This reflects the material reality of a literary sphere in which – as successive Stella counts have shown – books written by men get disproportionately more reviews than books written by women.</p>
<p>It is useful to note, if only for purpose of comparison, that in the heyday of the elitist Leavisites, exactly half of the four “great writers” he catalogued in The Great Tradition were women. As Leavis wrote,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The blunt instrument of the <a href="http://thestellaprize.com.au/schools-program/">Stella text count</a> may shed some light on the problem of gender relations, but there are more difficult issues at stake when it comes to questions of ethnicity and race. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2014/jul/08/five-indigenous-female-writers-who-should-be-on-school-reading-lists">Anita Heiss</a>, for example, has written about the Indigenous writers who ought to be studied in the school curriculum but currently are not.</p>
<p>In NSW, the Board of Studies responded to criticisms about gender bias in the curriculum by stating that the books had been chosen on the basis of “quality”.</p>
<p>Which merely leaves one wondering how on earth the great women writers – from Toni Morrison to Alice Munro – failed to make the cut. It also leaves one wondering whether the curriculum builders – a committee apparently composed largely of women – were oblivious to the ideological content of the thing they benignly call “quality”.</p>
<p>And what of the universities that were responsible for their education? When students are taught that literature is an ideological space in which redemption through male genius masquerades as rigour and analysis, for example – or that literature enacts a benign silencing that naturalises the ascendancy of white European culture – are they also being taught the skills required to detect such silencing and masquerading in themselves?</p>
<p>It is not just a question of what to read, but also how to read – of teaching students to read critically and carefully.</p>
<h2>Paying close attention</h2>
<p>Of course the canon should be taught. It is not the function of a university to foster ignorance in the name of politics. Like it or not, the canon is part of our cultural heritage. It is a powerful, and culturally influential body of work. In choosing not to teach it – or, rather, in refusing to critically engage with it – you are actually disempowering students. </p>
<p>The question is not whether or not it should be taught, but how.</p>
<p>I do not teach the canon. But this is not because I do not want my students to read those books – indeed, I actually do. </p>
<p>I do not teach the canon because I am not a teacher of English, let alone English Literature, but a teacher of writing. Struggling through four or five “great books” over the course of a semester is simply not as valuable for my students as working through 50 or 100 different writers, writing in 50 or 100 different styles, for 50 or 100 different reasons – not all of them for Literature. </p>
<p>Where another lecturer may see a canon in need of fortification or demolition, I content myself with a single passage. I want my students to understand it deeply and critically, at the level of the sentence. Why and how is a certain word used, and to what effect?</p>
<p>I also teach Adaptation, focusing attention on writers adapting work from out of the canon, or ‘writing back’ to it. This might include adaptions of Jane Austen, from Rajshree Ojha’s Aisha to Gurinder Chadha’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361411/">Bride and Prejudice</a> (2004).</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116843/original/image-20160330-28445-1ya06m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116843/original/image-20160330-28445-1ya06m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/116843/original/image-20160330-28445-1ya06m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116843/original/image-20160330-28445-1ya06m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116843/original/image-20160330-28445-1ya06m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116843/original/image-20160330-28445-1ya06m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1124&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116843/original/image-20160330-28445-1ya06m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1124&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/116843/original/image-20160330-28445-1ya06m0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1124&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A ‘micro’ book of Pushkin’s poetry.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters photographer</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It might include novelistic adaptions such as the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25622780-wide-sargasso-sea?from_search=true&search_version=service">Wide Sargasso Sea</a> (1966), Jean Rhys’ haunting portrait of Bertha Rochester, better known as the mad woman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre?from_search=true&search_version=service">Jane Eyre</a> (1847) (who resurfaces yet again as the eponymous character in Daphne du Maurier’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17899948-rebecca?from_new_nav=true&ac=1&from_search=true">Rebecca</a> (1938)).</p>
<p>In this way canonical works are brought into dialogue with the works of a dozen different writers, taught flexibly and openly, with a weather eye to change and re-evaluation. Teaching minor and popular works can actually be more challenging and therefore revealing for students. It also shows the students just how alive and influential these stories are.</p>
<p>But once the books are torn apart, I also want my students to tidy up and put the books back on the bookshelves – by which I mean understand the diversity of traditions and cultural perspectives from whence they came. I want them to make critically independent judgments.</p>
<p>Leavis wasn’t shy about making judgments. Indeed, he ought to be as famous for the canon that he trashed, as for the canon that he sanctified. He trashed Milton. He trashed Shelley and Keats. He called Dickens a mere “entertainer”. He said there was no English poetry worth reading since John Donne – with the exception, that is, of Gerard Manley Hopkins and (of all people) Thomas Carew.</p>
<p>What was valuable in the work of Leavis was clearly not any value-ridden “judgments”. Still less his almost evangelical mission to uncover the “human life” expressed in the writing. Rather, what Leavis and the New Critics in the United States did was replace the then predominant encyclopedic and bibliographic approach to writing with an attention to the meaning and texture of words on a page. Though Leavis roundly declared that he had absolutely no time for the teaching of writing, he read technically and fluidly, anxiously and probingly, as a writer reads.</p>
<p>This was the substantial intellectual legacy of Leavis. It was not in his moral seriousness, or his earnest and occasionally joyless pronunciations on the canon, but in his deployment of “Practical Criticism” or close and detailed reading as the means to critique it. </p>
<p>Skimming, or reading quickly to grasp ideologies or theories will not teach a student about the use of language, not when the real revelations are located between the words, in the structure of the sentences, and in the relationship between sentences and the world. </p>
<p>“Practical Criticism” means reading with closer critical attention to the way words mean and deceive, disturb the mind, power the emotions, tell truths or merely masquerade as them. </p>
<p>Here is yet another reason to teach the canon. The canon is quite simply the largest repository of exhilarating and disturbing words we have. </p>
<p>To recognize that words have a weight and a materiality and an affective power is not to believe that they are somehow free of ideology or politics – that they are torn loose from culture or history – but quite the reverse. It is to understand in a more nuanced and substantial way how writing works.</p>
<p>In a world that still conducts much of its life and its business in words, this is – as the curriculum builders say – the “transferrable skill”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56610/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Camilla Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Like it or not, the literary canon is part of the cultural capital of the West. Universities that choose not to teach it – or refuse to critically engage with it – are actually disempowering students.
Camilla Nelson, Senior Lecturer in Writing, University of Notre Dame Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/55666
2016-03-04T09:35:02Z
2016-03-04T09:35:02Z
How Robert Louis Stevenson’s reputation was shipwrecked by his inner circle
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113605/original/image-20160302-25908-1k6m4sr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">By John Singer Sargent in 1887</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/3750633474/in/photolist-6HqYEo-bz5DcL-5UFg1k-bz5Bgd-4VRNZJ-e61Vhn-8GH2GG-gtATfw-6Hr14Y-bpbz6c-bgZiAp-7MyzYA-cWzsYq-dxYJzk-bcaFDZ-dNarwD-byBd4k-5MfXW9-9oQhGa-8TVcsJ-8PvMqj-dNfYS3-dt1mZR-61v2wd-61uZSj-61qRLT-61v1GQ-61qNdZ-61uZDJ-61v1UC-61qPsM-61qRfx-61qNnc-pLLGbq-BpSuMn-BpSyqe-soa6Un-xjWNvA-AzLbRK-AzLfPV-BuSn53-AYEqmR-AzL1yF-BpSMtt-BpToFH-s6GBWv-s6GSqv-soagpe-s6GJdt-soa8o4">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ask most people about the heavyweights of late Victorian fiction and they will probably mention the likes of Thomas Hardy, George Eliot or Oscar Wilde. Raise Robert Louis Stevenson, however, and you’ll struggle to attract more than dusty affection: his work is usually seen as the stuff of old illustrated copies of boys’ adventures such as <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/120/120-h/120-h.htm">Treasure Island</a> and <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/421/421-h/421-h.htm">Kidnapped</a>, left in the forgotten corners of people’s attics.</p>
<p>It was very different in Stevenson’s lifetime. The Scottish writer was renowned as an essayist and belle-lettrist like <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-real-henry-james-will-never-stand-up-thats-his-greatest-legacy-55455">Henry James</a>, who himself regarded Stevenson as an equal in intellect and talent. Stevenson’s subsequent journey to the lightweight fringe was no accident either. You can trace it through a series of decisions and events that demonstrate an unsettling truth: once you are no longer here, there is little you can do to protect your literary reputation. </p>
<p>When Stevenson died aged just 44 on Samoa in December 1894, reportedly of a brain tumour, the Victorian literary world was reeling. James <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674387829">wrote of</a> the “ghastly extinction of the beloved RLS”. In Samoa, Stevenson had been known as “Tusitala”, the teller-of-tales, and his obituary in the Illustrated London News lamented his passing <a href="http://www.iln.org.uk/iln_years/year/1894.htm">as such</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He is gone, our Prince of storytellers – such a Prince, indeed, as his own Florizel of Bohemia, with the insatiable taste for weird adventure, for diablerie, for a strange mixture of metaphysics and romance. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Sugared Stevenson</h2>
<p>The high praise was not to last. After Stevenson’s death his family, notably his <a href="http://stevensonmuseum.org/robert-louis-stevenson/the-life/family/fanny-stevenson/">wife Fanny</a>, and literary friends such as <a href="http://www.norwoodsociety.co.uk/articles/116-sidney-colvin-a-norwood-man-of-letters.html">Sidney Colvin</a>, began to manage and manipulate his legacy. When Colvin published Stevenson’s letters, he had redacted material they thought unsavoury, including the writer’s disputes with his family and his salacious youthful activities. </p>
<p>Probably motivated by a desire to protect the lucrative revenues from those boys’ adventures, this sanitised his image. It made him more palatable for a moralistic Victorian readership, securing his reputation as a non-controversial writer of children’s fiction. In 1901 Stevenson’s great friend, the poet and critic WE Henley, <a href="http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-349-24355-6_42">decried how</a> he had been turned into a “seraph in chocolate” and a “barley-sugar effigy”. </p>
<p>Stevenson quickly became a target for other leading writers. Joseph Conrad denounced him, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Joseph_Conrad.html?id=rn-GQgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">declaring</a> to his agent, JB Pinker: “I am no sort of airy RL Stevenson, who considered his art a prostitute and the artist no better than one”. The American writer Stephen Crane was particularly disparaging, <a href="https://archive.org/details/ancientlightscer00ford">claiming</a>: “That man put back the clock of English fiction fifty years”. Even HG Wells wrote that Stevenson’s interest in the romance tradition was a “pitiful instance of the way in which wrong-headed flattery, a feminine book market, and a man’s own talent may triumph over his genius”. </p>
<p>Whether they were inspired by Stevenson’s image-makers is unclear, but these writers were certainly in the vanguard of a new generation who felt the need to distance themselves from their Victorian forebears. Stevenson was also phenomenally successful, so professional jealously may also have been a factor. It set the tone for a long period in which he was frequently seen in the same kind of way. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113608/original/image-20160302-25879-1bj0z2q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113608/original/image-20160302-25879-1bj0z2q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113608/original/image-20160302-25879-1bj0z2q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113608/original/image-20160302-25879-1bj0z2q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113608/original/image-20160302-25879-1bj0z2q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113608/original/image-20160302-25879-1bj0z2q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113608/original/image-20160302-25879-1bj0z2q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113608/original/image-20160302-25879-1bj0z2q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yo ho ho and all that.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidmasters/3587804365/in/photolist-6t3reX-pCoeqZ-mnbhJu-dXq6kH-ecia6C-eccuA8-eccvTe-axjnA9-okTKjW-okD586-5YivbC-axgFg6-w1KD5K-axgFsx-5Yiv7N-5YfTNX-hMGeYs-o4sihp-9uEFRh-7XYprG-74HbAh-67dFLK-59ScLt-qtbvg4-hX3xhJ-hMFRNC-7SBMKW-dUEnsT-dUKXNw-dUEnpi-oxk6Qm-bpbz6c-6F91jj-7WFehF-sPrkDT-aeYpVE-GMHiG-aeYraq-aeYrr9-wiGn8k-aeYqAq-6yVn3Z-aeYqMA-8yXuR6-aeVCAM-aeYqjq-8z1AWC-9hyBGa-ovvmGE-EuSSF9">David Masters</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The case for Robert Louis</h2>
<p>Stevenson’s work is actually far more complex and wide-ranging than these reductive assessments allow. For <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42">Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</a> alone, he should be regarded among the great British writers. A book of massive influence and endurance, Vladimir Nabokov <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8148.Lectures_on_Literature">believed that</a> it “belongs to the same order of art as […] Madame Bovary or Dead Souls”.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113604/original/image-20160302-25918-r6v3io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113604/original/image-20160302-25918-r6v3io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113604/original/image-20160302-25918-r6v3io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113604/original/image-20160302-25918-r6v3io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113604/original/image-20160302-25918-r6v3io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113604/original/image-20160302-25918-r6v3io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113604/original/image-20160302-25918-r6v3io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113604/original/image-20160302-25918-r6v3io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">No more Mr Nice Guy …</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/3750633474/in/photolist-6HqYEo-bz5DcL-5UFg1k-bz5Bgd-4VRNZJ-e61Vhn-8GH2GG-gtATfw-6Hr14Y-bpbz6c-bgZiAp-7MyzYA-cWzsYq-dxYJzk-bcaFDZ-dNarwD-byBd4k-5MfXW9-9oQhGa-8TVcsJ-8PvMqj-dNfYS3-dt1mZR-61v2wd-61uZSj-61qRLT-61v1GQ-61qNdZ-61uZDJ-61v1UC-61qPsM-61qRfx-61qNnc-pLLGbq-BpSuMn-BpSyqe-soa6Un-xjWNvA-AzLbRK-AzLfPV-BuSn53-AYEqmR-AzL1yF-BpSMtt-BpToFH-s6GBWv-s6GSqv-soagpe-s6GJdt-soa8o4">byronv2</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Treasure Island itself is more than meets the eye. It is actually a deeply subversive story of betrayal and divided loyalties, which deserves close reading. And beyond these household names, Stevenson also produced groundbreaking work that the likes of Wells and also 20th-century literary scholars unaccountably overlooked. Published in the year that he died, <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1604/1604-h/1604-h.htm">The Ebb-Tide</a> is a dark tale of tyranny and imperial mismanagement, which anticipates Conrad’s <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/219/219-h/219-h.htm">Heart of Darkness</a> and signals how Stevenson was beginning to question the morality of European interference in the Pacific. Together with the similarly themed <a href="http://www.enotes.com/topics/beach-falesa">The Beach of Falesá</a>, it shows that had Stevenson lived, he could have gone on to rival even Conrad as an imperial sceptic. </p>
<p>Stevenson incidentally had a strong influence on his literary critics. Conrad and Ford Madox Ford used the opening page of Treasure Island as the model for the first sequence of their collaborative 1903 novel, <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/joseph-conrad-and-h.-g.-wells-linda-dryden/?K=9781137500113">Romance</a>, actively seeking his fame and fortune whilst diminishing his art.
As for Wells, The Ebb-Tide is a considerable inspiration for <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29981.The_Island_of_Dr_Moreau">The Island of Doctor Moreau</a>, while <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/1003/">The Invisible Man</a> owes a great debt to Jekyll and Hyde. Put these arguments together and you begin to see why he was never denigrated in the same way overseas. Particularly in America, France and Italy, he has always been seen as a great writer. </p>
<p>Some more recent writers were kinder about Stevenson. Ernest Hemingway <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ijOsBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=%22ernest+hemingway%22+%22the+suicide+club%22&source=bl&ots=mIwiFYEnis&sig=EGakJPDuqSoytfiJSCgW-_5_rbk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjT9pj5tKTLAhWGPBoKHWSMDRgQ6AEITzAI#v=onepage&q=%22ernest%20hemingway%22%20%22the%20suicide%20club%22&f=false">was a fan</a>, for instance. Jorge Luis Borges <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=axSlBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=borges+on+stevenson&source=bl&ots=pDOg4UORWo&sig=PRJPW6jr7OFGHw5qGVKrl2mLb7w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-leuKuKTLAhWCExoKHYzGBPY4ChDoAQgmMAI#v=onepage&q=borges%20on%20stevenson&f=false">considered him</a> “among the greatest literary joys I have experienced”. In the 1990s he began to be welcomed back into the fold in literary academic circles. This was led by the likes of <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780333620670">Alan Sandison</a> and the rise of cultural studies, which argues that “high” and “low” culture are completely interdependent and don’t fit into separate boxes. </p>
<p>More than a century after his death, it finally feels like we have reached the point where Stevenson is fully gaining the reputation he so richly deserves. We at Edinburgh Napier University are playing our part with the Mehew Robert Louis Stevenson Collection of his books and papers, which officially opens to the public on March 17. For one of Scotland’s greatest writers, his homecoming is long overdue.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55666/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Linda Dryden received £34,000 from The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland to create the RLS website, which she administers. She is also co-founder of RLS Day in Edinburgh.
</span></em></p>
For too long the Scottish writer was seen as a populist pedlar of boy’s own adventures. This didn’t happen by accident.
Linda Dryden, Professor of English Literature, Edinburgh Napier University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/55455
2016-02-26T15:30:52Z
2016-02-26T15:30:52Z
The real Henry James will never stand up – that’s his greatest legacy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113079/original/image-20160226-27003-557gel.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Henry James in 1912</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the evening of December 1 1915, Henry James collapsed with a stroke at his home in London. At first it seemed that he would recover, but over the following weeks the renowned American novelist’s condition was far from steady. On some days he would be cogent and conversational, on others he would call in his secretary and earnestly dictate letters in the persona of Napoleon. At times, his hand would move across the bedspread as through he imagined he was writing. </p>
<p>His brother’s widow Alice braved the hazardous war-time Atlantic crossing to be by his bedside. Devoted literary friends such as <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Edmund-Gosse">Edmund Gosse</a> and <a href="http://www.edithwharton.org/edith-wharton/biography/">Edith Wharton</a> visited or kept in touch. In January 1916, James was awarded the Order of Merit for services to literature over a 50-year career, during which he had written some 20 novels and over 100 short stories. But he was 73 and his strength was fading. He had a history of heart trouble and depression, and he found the anxiety and grief of wartime exhausting. He died on February 28 the same year. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113085/original/image-20160226-26673-e9450q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vintage James.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/57440551@N03/23411616490/in/photolist-4ioD2g-pk5nKX-2TpGhw-BENDWb-5s4xwJ-qfvSwz-RUxc3-oeKsb5-e3Xybc-8nR99n-goEN3Y-7JkmSJ-7Jgrjg-apL9WG-eiWgGh-aP5wLx-r3V516-hAvjtM-baFKBP-2TmZ9f-45afe2-64qbTH-6YDjb3-8oQgQa-xJJnFb-55H6C-e6hGb9-5ffjX7-q1bKqG-77Wfi9-5RgGf7-8zLtAu-5KzoQF-y7iuUo-4kJm2J-aKphUe-9Z5Frj-hBoWd3-qNCgnT-oQzor6-f9o9TQ-5gm2oQ-77Skjt-47QuYi-cNj9Su-69bnrB-8rkNJp-tdfkkE-7c7GiL-77Wfk7/">Leo Boudreau</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One hundred years later, James’s cultural standing is higher than ever. His work features in classic paperback series and university reading lists, and has been adapted for film, television and stage. His private life has been scrutinised and reinvented repeatedly in biography and bio-fiction – <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43691.The_Master">sometimes</a> more creatively than accurately. His fiction and letters – over 10,000 still exist – are both in the process of being re-edited and republished. There are two international societies for scholars who are interested in studying his work. </p>
<p>This would all have been a surprise to James and his publishers, who never made as much profit from his work as they hoped. Many of his later novels failed to recoup their advances, and latterly he made more money from short stories placed in magazines. Even in his lifetime, James had a reputation as a difficult writer for clever readers. In fact, this reputation was part of his value in the magazine market, where his name on the contents page added a touch of literary class – whether his stories were read or not. </p>
<p>Yet in a world of cut-throat literary reputations, the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Portrait-Lady-Wordsworth-Classics/dp/1853261777">The Portrait of a Lady</a>, <a href="http://www.henryjames.org.uk/tots/home.htm">The Turn of the Screw</a> and <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/259020.The_Golden_Bowl">The Golden Bowl</a> has survived while contemporaries like <a href="http://www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/victorian-fiction-research-guides/sarah-grand/">Sarah Grand</a>, <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/caine/bio1.html">Hall Caine</a> and <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/corelli/salmonson1.html">Marie Corelli</a> who outsold him spectacularly have all but vanished. James often explored this mismatch between popularity and lasting value in tales such as <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/645">The Figure in the Carpet</a>. Shrewdly, he also saw that what readers respond to is not the real writer, but a persona which they buy into or construct. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113081/original/image-20160226-26687-42q8zk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Henry James 1843-1916.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/halighalie/663414371/in/photolist-21CaYP-6d6hS9-9XcgnY-4Xf5vH-9nBe6p-6d6iAY-6d6jkA-6d6h9Q-6d6iZy-bvRBiJ-9nBdwD-nLB9JY-nH7iu1-6orxvM-8yNEZN-6orwQP-7styWN-6gjyTj-5PEhy7-8fucFU-8PYwXP-4HVUVF-hsdV4x-6eX4n7-goD24d-4HDjd2-6d28HR-6d2b2x-8KGAQA-fDutq1-7KfBrA-4kj55r-7FnyNv-rwTh1-q6WYmb-5GtNk-4BvCqL-ndJrom-9n2bkj-goCNP2-6ovHhG-8Encfe-4J18Nq-eopjcC-bvfKQ-4HDizi-81CNy-goCJVv-goD53g-goD4Fs">giuliaduepuntozero</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>James signs off</h2>
<p>The last piece of writing James worked on before he fell ill <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/henry_james_review/v029/29.2.hutchison.html">was an essay</a> about the young English <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/brooke_rupert.shtml">soldier-poet Rupert Brooke</a>. Brooke had died the previous April of blood poisoning on a troop ship in transit to Gallipoli, just weeks after the publication of his <a href="http://www.rupertbrooke.com/poems/1914/">1914 sonnets</a>, including his best known poem, The Soldier. James knew him, and wrote to a mutual friend that this loss was so “stupid and hideous” that one could only “stare through one’s tears”. </p>
<p>James’s piece formed the introduction to Brooke’s travel essays, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1106608.Letters_from_America">Letters From America</a>, and was also a response to the mythology that sprang up around Brooke immediately after his death. In The Times, Winston Churchill had praised Brooke as the ideal of Englishness: “Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, ruled by high undoubting purpose.” </p>
<p>This obituary perhaps said more about Churchill and his agenda than about Brooke, however. Notably, it appeared alongside an appeal for more young men to enlist for military service. In contrast, James’s tribute focused on Brooke as a flawed human individual, while also making a strong claim that he be considered a “true poet” alongside Byron and Keats.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/113084/original/image-20160226-27003-1jyfj67.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">War-poet Rupert Brooke.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When Letters From America was published on March 8 1916, little more than a week after James’s death, this essay about the tension between a remembered person and a literary persona would have seemed even more poignant. Reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement the next day, James’s friend the biographer and critic <a href="http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/4838/Percy-Lubbock.html">Percy Lubbock</a> said that the names of Rupert Brooke and Henry James were both “already a legend”, and “here run into one”. </p>
<p>Lubbock would later be appointed as James’s literary executor and given the tricky job of publishing his unfinished work and collecting his personal letters for publication. By editing and promoting his writing, Lubbock would play a major part in creating one of the most enduring versions of James, that of the serious literary craftsman and thoughtful, scrupulous student of human nature. </p>
<p>There are certainly many other versions of James, often contradictory: shy, self-assured, homosexual, heterosexual, altruistic, rapacious, self-aware and self-deluded. You might wonder where, a century on, we can ever find the real James. We can’t. Like his creation Hugh Vereker in The Figure in the Carpet, he has vanished, leaving us to puzzle endlessly over his rich and multi-layered work. That’s precisely the beauty of it, though. The fact that James’s work can be interpreted and reconfigured in so many different ways suggests that when we read his fiction, what we are really learning about is ourselves. And that, of course, is the hallmark of a great writer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55455/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hazel Hutchison is the author of Brief Lives: Henry James (2012) and The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War (2015). She lectures at the University of Aberdeen. </span></em></p>
The American writer remains as elusive 100 years after his death as he was at the time.
Hazel Hutchison, Senior Lecturer, University of Aberdeen
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45175
2015-07-24T13:43:23Z
2015-07-24T13:43:23Z
The forgotten story of American writers on the frontline of World War I
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89627/original/image-20150724-7573-1216qoa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Henry James renounced his American citizenship in 1915 in response to his country's inaction</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_James#/media/File:Henry_James_by_John_Singer_Sargent_cleaned.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It was a very public gesture for a very private man. On July 26 1915, the novelist Henry James gave up his American nationality and became a British citizen. He placed a notice in The Times <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_2zbBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA113&lpg=PA113&dq=%22desire+to+throw+his+weight+and+personal+allegiance,+for+whatever+they+may+be+worth,+into+the+scale+of+the+contending+nation%E2%80%99s+present+and+future+fortune%22&source=bl&ots=tQtULMhUcC&sig=kyu3pCDC8kM33zinM9Jtc7fqDFk&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22desire%20to%20throw%20his%20weight%20and%20personal%20allegiance%2C%20for%20whatever%20they%20may%20be%20worth%2C%20into%20the%20scale%20of%20the%20contending%20nation%E2%80%99s%20present%20and%20future%20fortune%22&f=false">explaining why</a>. </p>
<p>He had lived in England for almost 40 years, he said, and had formed many “long friendships and associations”, but it was the war raging in Europe that had cemented his “desire to throw his weight and personal allegiance, for whatever they may be worth, into the scale of the contending nation’s present and future fortune”. </p>
<p>To intensify public interest, James asked H H Asquith, the British prime minister, to sign as one of his personal sponsors – each of whom had to testify that this celebrated author of some 20 novels and 100 short stories was capable of “speaking and writing English decently”. Even in the dark days of 1915, that must have raised a smile. </p>
<p>James was quite serious, however. For him, as for many Americans, the war in Europe was much more than a local squabble about geopolitical boundaries or a struggle for influence in the colonies. He called it the “crash of civilization”. To a post-evolution generation, brought up to believe that the biological world and social structures were all programmed to progress towards perfection, this vast and brutal conflict meant the collapse of an entire world view.</p>
<p>It was, James <a href="https://archive.org/stream/lettersofhenryja02jamerich#page/402/mode/2up">wrote to</a> a friend, as if they had all been drifting placidly along to the edge of some “grand Niagara”. He was bewildered that the US government seemed willing to sit back and observe, especially after the <a href="http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/snpwwi2.htm">sinking of the Lusitania</a> in May 1915 by a German U-boat with the loss of 124 American lives.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89628/original/image-20150724-7612-1h4t6zn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89628/original/image-20150724-7612-1h4t6zn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89628/original/image-20150724-7612-1h4t6zn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89628/original/image-20150724-7612-1h4t6zn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89628/original/image-20150724-7612-1h4t6zn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89628/original/image-20150724-7612-1h4t6zn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89628/original/image-20150724-7612-1h4t6zn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89628/original/image-20150724-7612-1h4t6zn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Sinking of the Lusitania greatly strengthened the case for getting involved in the war.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sinking_of_the_Lusitania_London_Illus_News.jpg#/media/File:Sinking_of_the_Lusitania_London_Illus_News.jpg">Wikimeda</a></span>
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<h2>Americans filling the breach</h2>
<p>James was not alone in feeling that America had a role to play. Although the US government would not officially join the war until April 1917, thousands of American citizens, perhaps as many as half a million, travelled to Europe to enlist with European armies – on both sides of the fighting. In 1914 around one in four Americans was of recent German descent; many mid-western communities were German-speaking. Conversely the east-coast bourgeoisie, many of whom had travelled in France or Britain, leaned towards the Allied cause. </p>
<p>No wonder president Woodrow Wilson hesitated to get involved. Many such volunteers did not come back. The poet <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/alan-seeger">Alan Seeger</a> died fighting with the French foreign legion, for example. But military action was not the only way of taking part, as Wall Street banks, farming collectives and munitions firms quickly discovered. By supplying the Allies with cash loans, wheat and arms, these businesses prolonged the war beyond the limits of British and French resources, and established America as the dominant world economy. This was not exactly the kind of intervention James had imagined. </p>
<p>Other Americans, including many writers, responded to the humanitarian demands of the war. James’s close friend Edith Wharton organised a refugee agency for Belgians in Paris. She also toured the Front for Scribner’s magazine, producing a vivid series of essays published as <a href="http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/wharton/france/france.html">Fighting France</a> in 1915. The novelist Mary Borden ran a field hospital for the French army, largely funded from her own fortune, and came to very bleak conclusions about the purpose and methods of the war – as voiced in her haunting memoir <a href="http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/Borden2/fz.html">The Forbidden Zone (1929)</a>. </p>
<p>Meanwhile Ellen La Motte, who nursed at Borden’s hospital, wrote <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26884/26884-h/26884-h.htm">The Backwash of War (1916)</a>. It was the first book to set the ironic and anti-idealistic tone that so many war texts would follow. Her opening chapter, “Heroes”, contrasts the selfish and petty wounded soldiers in her ward, the supposed heroes of the battlefield, with the dignity and courage of an attempted-suicide case. </p>
<p>Foiled in his attempt to shoot himself by the skill of the hospital surgeons, this soldier tears off his bandages night after night, determined to take death on his own terms. Tellingly, La Motte’s book was silenced by publishing restrictions after the US declared war in 1917. </p>
<h2>Ambulances, literally</h2>
<p>James’s own chance to do something concrete came when the archaeologist Richard Norton asked him to be honorary president of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps, later known as the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tZAJFEcDEz8C&pg=PA249&lpg=PA249&dq=Norton-Harjes+Unit&source=bl&ots=5wSKkAS9IF&sig=Ad_qrhpJVmaOytUZrUY-tg0PcoQ&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Norton-Harjes%20Unit&f=false">Norton-Harjes Unit</a>. Norton recruited his drivers mostly from Ivy-League universities. Such young men were more likely to speak French, meet their own expenses, and have driving skills – or better still to own a car that could be shipped to France and converted into an ambulance.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89629/original/image-20150724-7593-ywix5r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89629/original/image-20150724-7593-ywix5r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89629/original/image-20150724-7593-ywix5r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89629/original/image-20150724-7593-ywix5r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89629/original/image-20150724-7593-ywix5r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=357&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89629/original/image-20150724-7593-ywix5r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89629/original/image-20150724-7593-ywix5r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89629/original/image-20150724-7593-ywix5r.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Norton-Harjes Unit in 1917 with photographer Julien Bryan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFS_Intercultural_Programs#/media/File:Julien_Bryan_-_Ambulance_646_-_34.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As “gentleman volunteers” they were attached to no army and carried no weapons. Their sole brief was to transport the wounded to field hospitals such as Borden’s. James, increasingly horrified at the scale of the violence, felt this was a cause he could endorse. <a href="https://archive.org/stream/withintherim00jamerich#page/62/mode/2up/search/ambulance">He wrote</a> an open letter to the American press appealing for donations. </p>
<p>There was, he felt, something apt about the presence of “the university man” at the Front. These young graduates were able not just to offer practical help but also to understand “the palpable social result” of the war. In 1915 no one could have guessed how right James was. Over the course of the war, the Norton-Harjes Unit and operations like it <a href="http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/DosPassos.html">would turn out</a> some of the finest American writers of the post-war era, including Ernest Hemingway, E E Cummings, John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, Dashiell Hammett and Malcolm Cowley. One critic later called Norton-Harjes “the most distinguished of the lost generation’s finishing schools”.</p>
<p>Like La Motte, these new writers had little use for the language of the past. In a newspaper interview in 1915, James had said: “The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor-car tires”. It was a shrewd judgement about the impact of the war on the literature of the future. James would not write that literature; after a series of strokes, he died in February 1916. </p>
<p>But those men and women who observed the war would find new words and new ways to express what they had witnessed. They would also find ways to challenge the idea of what it meant to be American. Like James, these writers knew that sometimes the best way to serve your country is to tell it when it is wrong.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45175/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hazel Hutchison is a former President of the Henry James Society. Her book The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War is published by Yale University Press. The project received funding from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland</span></em></p>
When Henry James renounced his American citizenship in 1915 in response to his country’s inaction, he spearheaded a movement of writers who refused to sit on the sidelines amid turmoil in Europe.
Hazel Hutchison, Senior Lecturer, University of Aberdeen
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.